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Acting Without Me: Corporate Agency and the First Person Perspective

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Acting Without Me: Corporate Agency and the First Person Perspective Acting Without Me: Corporate Agency and the First Person Perspective Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever The work of Castaneda, Lewis and Perry convinced many philosophers that so-called de se attitudes (and the first-person perspective in particular) are the source of deep and wide- reaching philosophical insights. The de se, it is claimed, plays an essential role in giving an account of thought and agency. Others claim that the de se is essential to understanding morality, perception, or epistemic phenomena such as immunity to error through misidentification.1 The de se deflationists,2 on the other hand, have argued that the phenomena Lewis and Perry described tell us nothing of philosophical significance. According to the deflationist, Lewis and Perry used new and confusing terminology to describe old and familiar phenomena. This paper is a new defence of the deflationary view. Our focus is on the connections between the de se and agency. We have two central goals: 1. To provide a new argument that de se attitudes play no essential (or explanatorily important) role in understanding actions. Our argument turns on the nature of corporate agency and is, in outline, very simple: corporations, such as Apple and BMW, act, yet we don't and shouldn't attribute to them de se states, so de se states aren't necessary to explain at least one common and important type of agency. 2. A second central goal is show that corporate and human agency are more similar than is typically assumed: corporate agency can serve as a faithful model of human agency. We proceed as follows. 1 The seminal texts are by Perry (1977, 1979), and Lewis (1979), (1986). They both acknowledge the work of Castaneda (e.g. 1966) as an important precursor. More recent fans of the de se include Bermúdez (2017), Prosser (2015), Ninan (2010), Torre (2010), while work that puts the de se to work in diverse areas of philosophy includes McGlynn (2016), L.A. Paul (2017), and Titelbaum (2017). 2 For example Boer and Lycan (1980), Millikan (1990), Spencer (2007), Cappelen and Dever (2013), Magidor (2015). See Ninan (2016) for more references, some quotes, and a useful framing of the debate pro and con. 1 ● In the first section, we give some representative examples of corporations and their actions, with the goals of (a) making plausible that corporate entities can undertake genuine action and (b) showing some ways in which those actions can float free of the intentions and actions of individuals composing and associated with the corporate entities. ● In the second section, we set out a number of considerations suggesting that corporations do not need any sort of proprietary indexical states in order to act. We show that several lines of thought that people have taken to show that action is impossible without de se thoughts are not only uncompelling in the corporate case, but turn out to have their grip in the individual case weakened by virtue of seeing why they fail in the corporate case. At the end of the second section, then, the minimal goal is that the reader will be convinced that corporate action does not require de se states. ● In the third section, we turn to considering responses that attempt to preserve an essentiality thesis by arguing that corporate action is in some important sense different from “normal human action”, and is best understood as a kind of pseudo-action. We argue that all attempts to differentiate corporate from human action are dialectically ineffective, as they turn out to beg exactly the question at issue in the discussion of essentiality theses. ● In the final part of the paper we address an apparent tension in our view: On the one hand, we need to show that corporations don’t have or require de se mental states. In order to do that, we make the case for an important difference between individual and corporate action. On the other hand, the more convincingly we argue in favor of the view that individual and corporate action are the same, the more we inadvertently make the case that corporations do have and require de se states. But, the objection goes, we can’t have it both ways: either there is a crucial and philosophically interesting distinction here, or there isn’t. Before we get to all of that, a brief outline of the history of this debate. The tradition we’re responding to can be traced back to influential work by John Perry and David Lewis. Perry’s most famous example—the famous messy shopper from his (1979)—has been interpreted as showing that there’s a deep connection between indexicality and action. In that example, Perry is described as changing his messy behavior only after thinking the thought that would be expressed in words by ‘I’m making a mess’. Recognizing, in a first personal way, that he was the shopper making a mess, is, according to Perry, essential for the change in action. Perry says: “When we replace (“I”) with other designations of me, we no longer have an explanation of my behavior and so, it seems, no longer an attribution of the same belief. It seems to be an essential indexical.” (1979:3) 2 This line of thought has been extremely influential throughout philosophy. Here are two illustration of how the assumption is now appealed to more or less as common ground in contemporary philosophy: ...practical guidance is, in Perry’s phrase, essentially indexical, in the sense that its function depends not only on which of many propositions it expresses but also on how that proposition is determined by the context—specifically, on its being determined in the same way as the reference of indexical expressions such as “I”, “you”, “here”, and “now” (Velleman 2015: 78) It is widely agreed that agents need information in an egocentric form: they must think of places as “here” and “there”, times as “now” and “then” if they are to be able to act on what they know (Owens 2011: 267) Our goal in what follows is to sketch a view of human and corporate agency according to which they are fundamentally similar and not tied to the first person or other indexical attitudes. 1 Introducing Corporate Agency In this first section, we explain what we mean by ‘corporate agency’ and ‘corporate action’ and describe some of its relevant features. By ‘corporate actions’ we don’t mean simply ‘collective’ action. Collective actions paradigmatically involve multiple agents deliberately coordinating on the performance of a single task, in such a way that there is a clear sense in which each individual agent is, via the collective action, involved with and intentionally undertaking that task. Think, for example, of multiple agents cooperating to lift a table. Collective actions, however, are not the case we will focus on. Rather, we will consider cases of what we will broadly call corporate action. One particular kind of corporate action is action undertaken by traditional corporations. Apple, for example, chooses to announce a new model of iPhone at a conference. This is an intentional action – it results from deliberation on Apple’s part, as a strategy for satisfying Apple’s desire to win more market share, a strategy selected in light of Apple’s beliefs about what announcement strategy will maximize sales.3 But Apple’s action differs in some important ways from the action of the agents collectively lifting a table: 3 There is of course room for skepticism both about whether Apple genuinely performs actions and about whether, if it does, those actions are underwritten by mental states like belief and desire. For some skepticism about the skepticism, see section 3 below, especially the initial pro tanto case for corporate action and the closing comments on corporations and the mental. 3 ● When Apple announces a new model of iPhone, relatively few members of Apple may act. The announcement may be made solely by Tim Cook, while thousands of other employees4 go about their usual business. ● Even the deliberative process leading up to the announcement may have been undertaken only by a few members. So there is no helpful sense in which, when Apple announces a new iPhone, all members of Apple are involved with and intentionally undertaking the announcing. ● Indeed, it could be that no one does any announcing. One person might write part of an announcement script, someone else another part, a third person might edit it, yet a fourth person might forward the final version to the newspapers, and so on. Broadly, then, there are many organizations and social structures—entities which presumably in some broad sense are grounded in features of individual people (more or less – see one case to the contrary below)—which can be thought of as independent locuses of deliberation and action.5 It is these sorts of broadly corporate agents, and the actions undertaken by them, on which we will focus. For some of our subsequent purposes, it is worth attending to some features of the expansive boundaries of the category of corporate action. Note the following: ● A corporation can perform action A, as guided by an intention to A, resulting from a desire D and a belief B, even when every single member of the corporation is attempting not to do A (or even attempting to block A), as guided by an intention that not A resulting from a desire that not D and a belief that not B. Apple, for example, acts to cut prices on the iPhone, wanting to increase profits and thinking that lower prices will lead to higher sales and more profits.
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